Josh Mack blogging at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts, and occasionally on; bicycles, politics, Brooklyn, parenting, crafts, and good reading. Currently helping to build a new NYC neighborhood news site - nearsay.com, that celebrates the voices that make our city. Subscribe to the daily newsletter it gives you what you need to know.

October 04, 2010

Breakups are hard but I think I've arrived at a point in my relationship with General Tso where he and I need to spend some time apart. Lately our visits have been more out of habit than desire. He would not be wrong to think it is random and undeserved, after all I could do the same thing with wine, coffee, toast, and eggs, with whom I equally carry on affairs of convenience, and one day I may, but it is his turn. It is less a breakup than a weaning. I have no doubt that there will be visits but I think our weekly sessions need to stop. It is just time.

I think it is quite possible that I've had over 1,500 portions of General Tso's Chicken in my life to date though it could easily be more. I took off some for college years but there were definitely weeks growing up where we ordered it in more than once a week so it is neither here nor there. That would mean that the General and I have shared his chicken for longer than my daughter has been alive, for almost as long as I have known my wife. While less expensive a habit than smoking or a Starbucks latte a day it adds up to a decent car, a semester of kindergarten at my alma mater, or a real contribution to a nicer house.

I've been with the General so long but I really know nothing about him. On the one hand this is to be expected since he was too busy to meet with everyone on the West Side of Manhattan on Sunday night and would instead send intermediaries who would bring his chicken to our house. But I also suspect that some of this intentional, that the sauce and fried chicken were a smoke-screen blocking not only my arteries but any real attempt to get to know him as he hid behind different speed-dial numbers. Was he just an invention who came into my life as an odd circumstance of my birthplace. If I had grown up somewhere else he and I might never had met and formed the bond we did and I would be healthier for it. The planet would be healthier too and this has something to do with the breakup. His switch to plastic containers destined for landfill has saddened me. I think if the General and I had shared meals on the battlefield after plundering yet another chicken coop I might feel differently but he is now fighting a modern war and the plastic takeout is just another reflection of his impersonal ways. So goodbye General, we will meet again I'm sure but let's not make it too soon.

October 02, 2010

Fantastic project. I only hope that I can be as cool a dad to Willa when she gets older. I'm with the comments on Gothamist and would buy a Brooklyn Space Program t-shirt or contribute on Kickstarter for their next project.

Best-selling authors Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear are looking back to the future. This month, they launched a story —The Mongoliad— using a 175-year-old publishing model. Their novel-as-app (or app-as-novel) is coming out in weekly, serial segments, complete with cliffhanger endings and a cheap subscription rate.

Literary luminaries such as Charles Dickens (The Pickwick Papers), Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo) and Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina) published some of their most popular works in the serial format in the 19th century.

Today, instead of reading serialized stories in magazines, readers will pay $5.99 at mongoliad.com for a six-month app that gets them a chapter a week zapped to their smart phone, iPad or computer. The creators hope to have the book available at the iTunes store in the near future.

Stephenson and Bear, along with a group of other writers, illustrators and martial artists, have embarked on a historical tale, set in 1241, about a roving band of misfits that ends up helping to beat back the Mongol hordes intent on taking Europe. The story, up to four chapters in its first month, promises to be swashbuckling enough to keep a reader's interest but intricate enough to satisfy the duo's usual readers of their historic and science fiction. It's planned to last for one year, at which point a second "volume" will begin and — gasp — the first one may even be published as a print book.

The business model is akin to the "just in time" idea behind inventory. "We're aiming for a more agile, real-time product, in which we cheaply produce small amounts of material and make it available at a very reasonable price and avoid having to take the big risks," Stephenson says.

Extras add value: A mini-encyclopedia provides links throughout the story to research and background on the period, the characters and medieval sword fighting techniques. There are even videos of fight scenes choreographed by martial artists.

About 15 people are involved in the project, including an animator, seven writers, some researchers, a videographer and a fight choreographer for the sword fights. "They'll all be paid if it starts making money," Bear says.

This is awesome, great writers trying something interesting, tying in multimedia when needed. Given the length of Anatham and the Baroque Cycle who knows when this will actually end. The idea of "extras" on a serialized venture is also very interesting. One to watch and subscribe to if the adventures of the last stand of warriors battling against the Mongolian Hordes and the efforts of some really smart people interest you. Since it was partly due to Diamond Age, that I'm in this field, I'm subscribing.

But what is the point of this time-consuming procedure? Is any kind of communal wisdom glimpsed? Is there even a useful index so you can find, say, portraits of nude lions eating fruit? Actually, the tags are almost anticuratorial: they filter out any hope of wisdom. They are elementary, limited, the kind of associations encouraged in middle-school art classes. Monet’s “Church at Vernon,” we learn, is tagged “blue,” “dreamy,” “hazy.”

The various votes for “likes” in the museum are equally unilluminating. The result is a kind of scarcely literate cybergraffiti that does nothing to help reach a deeper understanding of the works or reveal their artistic traditions or cultural significance. The museum becomes a smorgasbord of objects, their importance a mystery.

September 27, 2010

Books with overlays are one of my favorite things and Cool Hunting linked to this interesting "book" about cities.

One of the things I hope we see as iPad apps develop, is apps that enable the overlays that used to be in all sorts of books when I was younger. The ability to swipe and go though time on a map, cover a skeleton with muscles, shift a sky around with the zodiac, swipe and get the different characteristics of birds to help narrow down identification are things I look forward to.

September 16, 2010

I got stuck in the storm/tornado in Park Slope, on 9th Street between 4th and 5th Aves. As soon as I crossed 4th Ave heading toward 5th, the rain became torrential and the wind, so intense that that , within seconds, it was a struggle to walk. In fact, there were times when it was almost impossible to walk. It was also hard to see; it was dark and the rain was so heavy. A few times, I had to close my eyes because the wind and rain were so violent. Things were flying overhead. Some giant green thing — I have no idea what it was — flew toward me and I ducked. I coudln’t beleive what was happening. Two people in front of me and I were thrown against a chain link fence near the intersection of 5th Ave and 9th St. We finally got to an ice cream /donut shop at the corner and got inside. It was terrifying. I’ve never been through a storm like that in the city before.

We began the summer a list of technologies, and a few bold claims and the goal to make an intrinsically more private social network. The overwhelming response that we elicited made us realize that technology woudn’t be enough. Even the most powerful, granular set of dropdowns and checkboxes will never give people control over where their content is going, let alone give them ownership of their digital self.

We live our real lives in context, speaking from whatever aspect of ourselves that those around us know. Social tools should work the same way. Getting the source into the hands of developers is our first experiment in making a simple and functional tool for contextual sharing. Diaspora is in its infancy, but our initial ideas are there.

September 15, 2010

As we get older, our senses actually "fuse" together, and we lose the ability to focus on isolated pieces of sensory information. This means adults perceive certain events far more accurately than children can... and vice versa.

Once people reach about the age of twelve, they start to combine sensory information to make better sense of the world. This means adults connect, say, related sights and noises into a single unified perception. In other words, while an adult would perceive a big, barking dog as a single entity, a six-year-old would treat the big dog and the frightening barks as two independent sensory events.

So why are government and media going after craigslist? The same reason, I think, that media and government in, for example, Germany are demonizing Google (even as the German people give Google its biggest market share anywhere in the world). They’re going after the disruptors, the biggest disruptors in sight.

Since craigslist and the internet have existed, newspaper classified revenue has fallen by $13 billion a year, leaving that money in the pockets of former advertiser-customers. Since Google and the internet have existed, many more billions have left traditional media as Google offered their former ad customers a better deal.

September 13, 2010

If you think about all the things people search for on Google, “God” has to be pretty high up there, right? I mean, since the dawn of man, people have been searching for the meaning of life and its creator, so what better way to do that than with a search engine? But divinity apparently has nothing on cheap domain names....

To make Google Instant work, the search giant looks across all queries to find the most popular ones and then predicts what it thinks you’re going to type and auto-populates the results based on that. Clearly, both “Godaddy” and “God of War” are more popular queries on Google — something that is either humorous or sad depending on your level of religiousness.

September 06, 2010

September 03, 2010

Coolhunting has made to two great little videos about the Brimfield Flea Market. The market happens three times a year and takes over the entire town for a 5 days. What I love about the videos are the views of all of the fantastic and focused collections that vendors bring. The last one of 2010 starts is Sept 7-12th so if you haven't got plans maybe these videos will inspire you to take a last-minute roadtrip.

September 01, 2010

The golfer at the Shady Canyon Golf Course in Irvine landed a shot in the rough Saturday. On his next swing, his club snagged a rock, causing a spark that lit the rough ablaze and eventually attracted 150 firefighters to the scene.

Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison design is a perennial metaphor in discussions of digital surveillance and data mining, but it doesn’t really suit an entity like Google. Bentham’s all-seeing eye looks down from a central viewpoint, the gaze of a Victorian warder. In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory. We are part of a post-geographical, post-national super-state, one that handily says no to China. Or yes, depending on profit considerations and strategy. But we do not participate in Google on that level. We’re citizens, but without rights.

August 24, 2010

Some of my good friends are food and drink writers. I get to eat well, and (when not on IV antibiotics) often drink well too. I give them advice on how to use the Internet to reach new fans (good students they each have thousands of twitter followers now their following every sip and morsel) and also occasionally build them sites. This has its upsides as I love helping my friends (and authors in general) but I also hate maintaining them so over the past few months I've moved two of them over to TypePad. I also work for Six Apart so while it makes sense for professional reasons, it just so happens that TypePad is a great platform. Both blogs are built using the stock Mosaic design with sized header images. Importing their old posts was a breeze.

One of them belongs to Melissa Clark, an award-winning author who also writes a column in the NY Times. And the other which I put up today belongs to Alice Feiring, a wine writer, author, and champion of biodynamic wine. Alice is the anti-Robert Parker. Her old site had actually been nominated for a James Beard Award and was up against Epicurious and others, so it took a bit for me to want to move it.

August 17, 2010

What helps is when you actually sit down and try to jot some notes down from a TED "lecture" on the "subject" of "creativity", and all you end up with are three meanderingly abrupt sentences that say things like "monkeys play with balls", "humans like the colour red", "cheese was developed by mistake".

The feeling that you've wasted your time is so powerful it's almost existentially thrilling.